Moving average, ETF, price to earning ratio … just the thought of attending a course about investing made my eyes glaze over. Still, my long-time financial strategy — stuffing extra funds into a savings account and hoping for the best — is on life support these days thanks to the interest rates. And so, I told myself heading into my first class, nothing ventured, nothing gained. See? I was using investor lingo already.

The instructor looked the part. Paul Thornton’s a trim guy, short hair, clean-shaven, dress pants, shirt, tie. He started out as an advisor in the late ’80s, but a few years ago he changed his game to head up an online research service for investors. I wasn’t surprised to learn he’d been teaching Investor Boot Camp for the past decade — you could tell by the way he fiddled with a piece of chalk that he was practically itching to use the chalkboard. After a brief introduction, he got straight to it and scrawled two charts on the board.

“Who here would buy a stock that looked like this,” he said referring to the first one, which had a line sloping upwards. The class, comprised of folks from the GTA of various ages and ethnicities, looked around at each other. A few tentatively raised their hands.

“What about this one?” he said of the second chart with a line sloping southward. A few more hands.

“OK, how many people here don’t know?”

My hand, among many, shot up. From the beginning, Thornton’s teaching style created a comfort zone in which it was OK to be wrong. In fact, he almost set us up for it. Repeatedly, he asked seemingly no-brainer questions that most of us would answer incorrectly. Buy low, sell high, right? Wrong. Stay away from expensive stocks going through the roof, right? Wrong. Buy lots of different stocks so you’re diversified, right? Wrong. And my favourite: Learn everything there is to know about a company before investing, right? Wrong again.

Some students got their backs up. Some fought back. It was great fun.
“He makes some interesting points,” said Cy Celik, 63, a stock market veteran who challenged Thornton’s theories regularly. “I think he learned a few things from me, too, though.”

If emotions sometimes run high in the classroom, they constantly do in the markets, Thornton told us. We learned (to my relief) that it’s not all about stats but rather, sentiment. Emotions rule.

“The trick is to learn how to interpret investment behaviour,” Thornton said. “It’s like being a detective and a psychologist looking for clues.”

Interestingly, some people in the class knew nothing about investing while others were savvy. Mila Golubyeva, who at 23 was one of the youngest participants, doesn’t have any money in the markets currently but hopes to one day and wants to learn all she can now. At the other end of the spectrum was Karen Edwards, who, in her early sixties, has been investing for years. She has taken Thornton’s course five times.

“I think he’s an excellent teacher and because the markets are always changing, different issues are addressed depending on when you take the course. Besides, investors tend to live in a bubble and it’s good to get out once a week and talk about this kind of stuff with others.

But is a course comprised of only five two-and-a-half-hour sessions enough to jump into the scary world of the stock market? Some students said yes, others, no way. Me? Maybe not jump, but dip in a few digits?

Investor Boot Camp runs three times a year through Toronto District School Board Continuing Education. Winter session starts in January. Registration is Nov. 15. The brochure comes about two weeks earlier but sign up fast — Thornton’s classes tend to have a waiting list. For details, email paul@investorbootcamponline.com or visit tdsb.on.ca.